Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to marketing and advertising. More specifically, the present invention relates to collage-based, integrated advertising systems and methods of advertising.
Description of the Prior Art
Over time a rich and varied array of print and electronic media strategies, production techniques and publication forms have been used by product manufacturers, advertising agencies and publishers to stimulate product sales. Image advertising is employed to grasp prospect attention and install and reinforce brand attributes. Sales promotion techniques, including, discount coupons, sweepstakes, contests, gaming, sampling, in/on packs, and enhanced display entice engagement. Database marketing tracks and stores information about sales completed and/or interactions achieved. Customer relationship management (CRM) develops and coordinates on-going, messaging, loyalty and related programs.
The present invention is a new commercial communication vehicle that permits an array of marketing techniques to be delivered simultaneously and in conjunction, via a hybrid, cooperatively, co-sponsored, interactive print and electronic publication, which combines known artistic disciplines, marketing techniques and technologies into a poster and Internet website and/or virtual presence or online presence, which utilizes the collage design technique, allowing participating product marketers, to gain association and cost efficiency benefits, through this new, unique and novel, unified interface, trans-medium, promotional messaging development and delivery system.
As a main component of an embodiment of the present invention is the poster medium, a brief descriptive history of which appears following. (Source: Adapted from www.wet Canvas.com)
A poster is a large piece of printed matter designed to be attached to a wall or vertical surface. Typically posters include textual and graphic elements, but may be all graphics or all text. Posters are designed to be eye-catching and to convey information. They are used for many purposes, and are used frequently by advertisers, propagandists, protestors and other groups trying to communicate a message. Posters are also used for reproductions of artwork and educational purposes.
The posters medium as an information source can be traced as far back to the 15th century, when each sheet was handmade by artisans to provide news, announcements, and other information to the populous, which began a replacement of the town crier who would traverse the streets and announced royal, religious and trade orders and proclamations, goods for sale, local events, burials, etc., at town crossroads.
In 1628, Parisian physician Théophraste Renaudot created his “Bureau d′adresses”, a listing of small advertisements indexing suppliers and buyers of various products. In 1633, he printed loose sleeves reproducing this information under the name of “Sheets of the Bureau d′adresses” and created the first advertising poster.
In 1798, the lithographic printing press allowed mass production of all shapes and sizes of posters. By 1848, it was possible to print 10,000 sheets per hour. Jules Cheret, “the father of the poster”, was the first person to mass produce the medium, giving the medium its own aesthetic identity and autonomy from other fields of pictorial art.
In 1867, the age of the artistic commercial poster was born when Cheret's print shop produced the first poster of Sarah Bernardt as Princess Desiree in the comedy La Biche au Bois, for Bal Valentino. Cheret almost single handedly turned Paris into the “picture gallery of the street.” In 1881 or 1895, a law was passed which created official “posting places”, and an entire industry was created. Every poster required a tax stamp to indicate that a fee had been paid for the right to post it. Based on square footage, the tax led to the adoption of standard sizes. Advertisers worked with artists, printers and posting companies to create, post and maintain street posters. As result of the most prominent poster artists moving to other fields of research and work the poster as an artistic medium began faded after 1900.
Poster Collage Prior Art
As the collage design technique is also a central component of the current invention, a brief overview to the medium follows. (Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage).
Collage (from the French, coller, to glue) is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different elements, material, and forms to create a new multidisciplinary whole.
Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China, around 200 BC. The use of collage, however, remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. The technique of collage appeared in medieval Europe during the 13th century. Gold leaf panels started to be applied in Gothic cathedrals around the 15th and 16th centuries. Gemstones and other precious metals were applied to religious images, icons, and also, to coats of arms. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).
Despite the pre-twentieth-century use of collage-like application techniques, some art authorities argue that collage, properly speaking, did not emerge until after 1900, in conjunction with the early stages of modernism. For example, the Tate Gallery's online art glossary states that collage “was first used as an artists' technique in the twentieth century.” According to the Guggenheim Museum's online art glossary, collage is an artistic concept associated with the beginnings of modernism, and entails much more than the idea of gluing something onto something else. The glued-on patches which Braque and Picasso added to their canvases offered a new perspective on painting when the patches “collided with the surface plane of the painting.” In this perspective, collage was part of a methodical reexamination of the relation between painting and sculpture, and these new works “gave each medium some of the characteristics of the other.” Collage in the modernist sense began with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
The twentieth century printing related derivative of the collage design technique, is photomontage created in a process of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture is sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. Today's photomontage is often performed with the use of digital software programs.
In the decade of the 1980s, New York-based Paper magazine sometimes published a local black & white magazine in a folded poster format that frequently incorporated collage design, providing the name and address of the local retail business establishment where the product could be purchased.
Poster Publication Prior Patents
Concerning patented poster publications Trikillas U.S. Pat. No. 4,538,833, Sep. 3, 1985 for a Publication, Kelly's U.S. Pat. No. 4,487,431, Dec. 11, 1984 for a Publication Convertible to Poster, and Hollander's U.S. Pat. No. 5,234,832, Aug. 10, 1993 for Poster & Catalog, all present innovations related to the poster medium, but none claims/includes the elements of co-sponsored imagery, the offering of multiple promotional types on a single vehicle, at least note as a core component of the medium. Also none of these patents mentions links to any form of online presence, or makes any reference to database marketing techniques.
As indicated there exists considerable prior art regarding the application of collage and photomontage to the poster medium and commercial art. However, no prior art reveals a situation, scenario, process or mechanism or device, where multiple, paid sponsored elements, are combined to create an cooperative, unified image collage, where elements of the sponsored collage are used to create a multimedia publication, composed and comprised of a print poster, and a corresponding, message extending and deepening Internet presence website and/or virtual presence or online presence, wherein the sponsored elements are also simultaneously components of the websites website and/or virtual presence or online presence navigation, and wherein the elements of the sponsored collage are also used as part of an interactive promotional activity, and wherein the sponsored collage-based poster, website and/or virtual presence or online presence and navigational components—in combination—are the attention generating, awareness raising, message enhancing and interface operating elements, employed for the purpose of enrolling members of a target audience, into an electronic, interactive messaging system that utilizes user tracking, database gathering, computer server based storage, data analysis and manipulation methods as key elements in an on-going marketing communications outreach effort(s).
Coupon Patents
As an element of the current invention involves the distribution of promotional offers including discount coupons, a review of couponing prior art reveals, Washburn's U.S. Pat. No. 3,032,904, May 8, 1962, for Coupon Calendar, and Morton's U.S. Pat. No. 4,195,864 Apr. 1, 1980 for a Multi Product Coupon. Both are similar to the current invention with regard to delivering a variety discount price promotional offers from a group of cooperating marketers, via a single printed vehicle. However these patents make no reference to the elements and/or processes for combining a wide range of sponsored element types, onto a poster, with a companion website and/or virtual presence or online presence and/or of being part of an electronic, interactive messaging system.
Further, as the current invention's business practice is to be cooperatively sponsored, Mitchell's U.S. Pat. No. 6,196,592 B1, Mar. 6, 2001, for Cooperative Promotions, and Disterdick's Patent Publication No. 2005/0049919 A1, Mar. 3, 2005 for a Method for Advertising and Patent Publication No. 2006/0173745 A1, Aug. 3, 2006 for a Tiered Method of Advertising both.
Allison's Patent No. 2008/0217905A, Sep. 11, 2008 for an Advertising Program Using Playing Cards provides a description of a method for marketers to cooperate in a print based cardboard medium. Allison's scope is however limited to card decks, and has a very casino-oriented focus. Further, Allison makes no mention of utilizing a poster or elements related to the current invention's poster component.
Interactive Advertising Patents
As the current invention also concerns methods of interactive advertising Strunk's U.S. Pat. No. 6,708,176 B2, Mar. 16, 2004 for a System & Method for Interactive Advertising System refers to a method for delivering public ads and announcements in an interactive format, but the patent relates to an electronic system with no mention or reference to the use or utilization of physical paper-based print publication as a component of the interactive elements.
Villanueva's Patent Publication No. 2008/0126152 A, May 29, 2008 for an Internet Based Advertising & Marketing Management Interactive System, includes language involving “a plurality of adjacent boxes composing as a whole an advertising collage, and that these boxes can be grouped selectively, in multiple combinations with flexible edges”, which has some relation to the current invention's methods of image display. However, the patent begins with a “first website”, and relates purely to electronic media. No reference or mention is made in Villaneuva's patent of there being a paper, or other such materials poster, capable of delivering multiple promotions and or samples on the physical body of the invention. Further, there is no mention of having the sponsors being a component part of combination promotion.
Objects & Advantages of the Invention
A principal object of the present invention is to create a new commercial marketing communications vehicle.
Another object of the present invention is realize a new, creatively expressive commercial pop art form.
Another object of the present invention is to have a way to easily fund a form of new pop art.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a communications method that delivers multiple types of marketing messages and techniques in a single, integrated, interactive form.
Another object and advantage of the present invention is to create a sponsorable large format, multi-media poster-based publication.
Another object and advantage of the present invention is to create a unique and novel showcase for new print and electronic technology.
Another object of the present invention is to assist advertisers to gain the benefits and advantages of improved brand imaging through association with other advertisers.
The Applicant is unaware of inventions or patents, taken either singly or in combination, which are seen to describe the instant invention as claimed.